In this article I will discuss how to get the most out of small scale, indoor vermicomposting without expensive or complicated equipment. You probably already have most of the tools you'll need to get started.

Suggested Materials and Tools for Vermicomposting

Shovel

Drill

1/4″ drill bit

Drill mounted paint mixer (optional, for large scale vermicomposting)

18 gallon or larger rubber tub (for larger scale vermicomposting)

One or more 3.5, 5, or 6 gallon buckets with lids, or a few 10 gallon rubber tubs with lids

Earthworm Species for Vermicomposting

Red Wiggler – Eisenia fetida

African Night Crawler – Eudrilus eugeniae

The most popular species for composting are Eisenia fetida, or simply the “red worm” or “red wiggler” although their coloring is considered brown with buff bands. They are often mistaken for and even found with Eisenia andrei whose coloring is more red, but is of about the same size. Both worms perform best at 77°F (25°C)and will tolerate temperatures from 32-95°F (0-95°C) , with moisture levels at about 80-85%. Red worms are the most commonly used species for vermiculture.

Eudrilus eugeniae (African Night crawler) is my personal favorite for indoor vermicomposting. It is the fastest compost turner and reproducer of all three species. For optimum performance it needs to stay between 60-86°F (15.5-30°C), moisture 80%. It can tolerate temperatures down to 40°F (4.4°C) or so.

No matter which worm you choose, you'll want one pound of worms for each square foot of compost/bedding. A 3.5 gallon bucket is about 1 square foot.

What You Need for an Earthworm Compost Bin

“Flow through” bins are popular and there are a multitude of commercial bins and do-it-yourself instructions available. Personally I prefer simpler bins, for a couple of reasons.

Flow through bins create conditions where it is easier for anaerobic bacteria to get a foot-hold and proliferate. If anaerobic bacteria take over the bin it will stink and your worms will be sickly if not dead. At this point your bin will have to be cleaned thoroughly, and it can be a real pain, depending on the size and extravagance of the bin.

The secret to happy and healthy worms is simple:

Fresh bedding

Aeration

Correct amount of food

Frequent casting harvests

Thorough, frequent bin cleaning

Although worms do not seem to mind living in close proximity with one another, eventually when kept in the same dirty bin for too long, their castings and other waste materials start to add up. That's not healthy–no one wants to live in their own waste material. That's why I advocate frequent casting harvests and bin cleanings.

The Earthworm Bins I Use

I recommend 3.5 (pictured below), 5 or 6 gallon plastic buckets or at largest, 10 gallon rubber totes. Several small bins are preferable to one large bin because of maneuverability. A 3.5 gallon bucket filled with compost and one pound of worms will weigh between 15 and 20 pounds.

Note the rows of holes below the bin's rim. Ventilation is very important to your worms so only fill the bin to the bottom row of ventilation holes. I like to use lids on my bins to prevent escapees, making the ventilation holes even more important.

Bedding for Your Earthworm Bins

If you can get it, my favorite worm bedding is “fine screened leaf compost”. It can be found at your local wood and leaf recycling center. Towards spring they usually run out, so in the autumn, I take our truck down and get couple yards, then shovel it onto a tarp outside and cover with more tarps. It's important to cover your leaf compost if you live in a climate with a lot of precipitation, or it will get too wet and rot.

If you make your own leaf/lawn compost, it should work great as long as the compost is past the thermophilic stage when you use it for your worms. (You don't want your worms to get too hot.)

To make leaf compost go further, mix it about 1:2 or even 1:1 with coconut coir. Coconut coir is sometimes processed in salt water so look for garden grade coir. Coir is a great carbon source, absorbs and retains moisture really well, and helps fluff your compost, making the bins lighter and easier to handle.

Temperature

Bring the compost you intend to use for bedding inside the night before to warm up if temperatures are cool.

Use a thermometer to monitor temperature in the bins until you get a feel for what external temperature is ideal for your particular set up. For our set up, the room temperature is kept at about 65°F (18.3°C) in the winter and 72°F (22°C)in the summer.

Feeding Your Composting Worms

Worms have no teeth, so they need food mushy and in small bites. Chop the food very small, or even puree it in a blender. Freezing and thawing also helps to soften the food.

For a Single Worm Bin with Red Worms and Bedding

Red wiggler worms eat roughly 1/4 to 1/2 their weight in food scraps each day. For a single bin, bury food scraps or slurry just below the surface of the worm bedding once or twice a week. So for 1 pound of worms, you would need roughly 1.25 to 3.5 pounds of food scraps per week.

For Setting Up Several Worms Bins at Once with Leaf Compost

To mix worm chow in volume, for each 3 to 4 gallons of compost add about 1-1.5 cups of chopped or blended vegetable/fruit matter, and a couple tablespoons of ground grains. Mix compost and food together really well in your 18 gallon rubber tub. Using a drill and paint mixer for this will speed up the mixing process. Divide this leaf compost/worm chow slurry mix between your worm bins.

Recommended Foods for Worm Composting

Fruit waste; peels, cores leftovers

Vegetable waste; peels, cores, leftovers

Limited grains are not only okay, but good for them for the protein content

Foods Not Recommended for Worm Composting

Meat

Dairy

Too many grains

Pet feces

Fresh manure

Dead bodies

Zombies

The late Mary Appelhof wrote in her book Worms Eat My Garbage about burying small amounts of leftover meat on the bone with no ill effects.

pH

The pH in your worm bin needs to be between 5.6 and 7.0, the closer to 7.0 the better.

To raise the pH:

Add 1 tablespoon of agricultural lime per 3-4 gallons of food/compost

Mix well (If you can still see the lime after mixing, add some water)

Let sit for 15 minutes

Take the pH again

Continue adding lime at that rate until the desired pH is reached

In the unlikely event that you need to lower your pH use:

Peat moss

Coffee grounds

Whole wheat flour

Cornmeal

If those don't work, mince or puree citrus fruit and add about a tablespoon per 5 gallons compost, incorporate really well into the compost, and add a bit of water. Check the pH and continue adjusting accordingly.

Vermicomposting – Filling Your Worm Beds

For a Single Worm Bin with Red Wigglers

Shred newspaper or other bedding material.

Wet down bedding until it passes the squeeze test (see above).

Fill worm bed at least half full with damp bedding.

Add a handful of dirt or compost for grit for the worm's gizzards.

Add your red wigglers.

Cover and place in a well lighted room for two days. The light encourages the worms to stay in the bin and explore safely.

Feed the worms by pulling back some bedding and adding some food scraps. Cover the scraps with bedding.

Harvesting the Earthworm Compost

If using newspaper or other bedding and regular addition of scraps, your compost will be ready in about six months. With the leaf compost/worm chow slurry combination, in 1.5-2 weeks, the worms will be out of food and your bin should be about 1/4 – 1/3 full of castings. (The leaf compost that is left can also go straight into the garden.)

There are a couple of ways to go about harvesting, depending on how pure you want your castings.

Collecting Worm Castings – Method 1:

Dump entire contents of bin onto a well lit surface.

While waiting for the worms to move to the bottom of the pile, hose down and scrub bins with a cleaning brush, taking special care to clean the vent holes.

Collecting Worm Castings – Method 2:

Use 1/8″ screen (hardware cloth) to harvest a purer product. I really like the instructions for the harvester referenced above, but if you find something you like better, by all means try it and let us know how it goes. Remember to clean bins before re-bedding worms.

If you need a small amount of worm compost before the whole worm bin is ready to harvest, you can gently push the bedding aside and reach down into the bottom of the container to scoop up a handful or two. (Worm compost makes great food for houseplants and is a gentle plant food for seedlings, too.)

Whichever method you choose, after a few harvests, you will need to weigh your worms. More than likely you will have gained some worms, but if there are less than what you put in to begin with, you'll need to do some trouble shooting.

How to Start a Worm Bin – Your Guide to Getting Started with Worm Composting

For more detailed information on worm composting, including a comparison of commercial worm bins, worm bin troubleshooting, other critters that may show up in your worm and more, check out “How to Start a Worm Bin – Your Guide to Getting Started with Worm Composting” by Henry Owen. Henry is the Executive Director of the Nature Discovery Center in Bellaire, Texas and loves connecting kids with nature.

Basic worm anatomy and reproduction information (great for kids as well as adults)

Tips for Sizing your Worm Farm

Ideas for Upcycling a Variety of Containers into Worm Bins

Troubleshooting Reference Chart and Worm Composting Q&A

Instructions for making worm compost tea and using worm compost in seed starter mix

The book is free with Kindle Unlimited, and the print version is under $10. It's a great little guide for the beginning worm wrangler.

This is a guest post by Corinna Fritz. Corinna and her husband Dustin share a passion for family, homeschooling, homesteading/self-reliance, nature and small businesses. Corinna's understanding, love and respect for livestock, gardening, worms, and natural flora and fauna began when she was a young girl living on a ranch in Wyoming. These days the Fritz family are small business owners and novice homesteaders on 6 acres of land in the temperate rain forest of Washington state. You can read more about their adventures at: http://cyberscryber.blogspot.com/.

Comments

For those that don’t want to jump in as deep as you have, I just want to say it’s worthwhile even with just a few plastic totes. I have 2 large plastic totes that I keep in the house – no odor and just sit in a warm corner of the guest bedroom. They are just enough to feed all of our household waste and discard and provide just enough fertilizer for my house plants and10′ x 12′ raised vegetable garden. No trouble at all – feed once a week, add shredded paper and remove castings once a month.

Thanks for your comment. 🙂 I hope I didn’t give the impression a person needed to start with 50 buckets, lol. 4-10 buckets would be adequate for most people. I just used pictures I already had on my computer, and honestly that was only a fraction of the number of worms we used to have. I like to use the buckets because I’m only 4’11 and 105 pounds, so lifting a full 18 gallon rubber tub is a bit much for me. My husband can do it, but doesn’t like to. It is okay to just dump it on the floor and shovel the contents into the harvester, but its quicker if I can just pick up a bucket and dump it in the harvester. Works for me because I’m sort of petite, and I figure this method would give people who had the same or other physical limitations some good ideas. 🙂

What is the full name of these buckets, im googl-ing every name that have a litle bit of sense and cant find out who manufacture them. Im from Croatia and i would like to find out how much they cost so i could compare how much would it cost me that some one in Croatia made the same one for me.

I just acquired my “first” worms and started a worm farm. At least that is what I’m calling it. It took them nearly a week to settle in as the journey to my home was apparently traumatic. Now that they are in their new home, they are eating voraciously. I have had to pre-plan their meals and stage them so that they are ready to go into the worm bin when the worms have devoured everything from the day (or so) before. I’ll get to the point where I don’t mess with them quite so much when the excitement wears off. Right now, they are just plain fun to watch. I have no idea why.

When they outgrow the bin I purchased, I am planning a do-it-yourself model made of 5 gallon buckets that I stack together. I’m going to drill holes in the bottoms so that the worms can crawl up through the holes, leaving the compost behind – or at least, that’s my plan. I’m willing to give it a try. I get free 5 gallon buckets from my local b-b-q place.

I did put a few of the worms in my outside compost bin, too, to see what they can do to that.

Hi Laurie, I have been vermicompsoting for many years with red wigglers. I just ordered some African night crawlers and would like to get some tips on raising them. I keep hearing how hard they are but am getting no specific info on how to keep them happy. any help is greatly appreciated!

Garden crops like tomatoes are commonly dressed with a layer of worm castings as “mulch”, but you can add a couple scoops during planting, or use the castings however you like. They are unlikely to burn the plants like some fertilizers.

I can’t find a good photo right now, and our ground is still frozen outside so I can’t find anything fresh there, but the castings look very much like small (about 1 cm diameter), rounded piles of dirt. There are often several small rounds piled next to each other.

What an excellent article. This knowledge is especially valuable for those who live in areas with poor soils as your worms can create the soil you grow in. I’m in the process of setting up a vermicomposting system now. Sine my “soil” is caliche I use raised beds but have to replenish the soil every couple of years to maintain proper depth. With vermicomposting I can create my own soil, rich in nutrients, and not have to buy garden soil from someplace like Home Depot.

May I reprint this article, with proper attribution, in my monthly Dying Time Newsletter? I think my readers, who have a Prepper bent, would enjoy it.

I agree that this is an excellent article on vermicomposting. My husband and I have used worms to make the compost for our gardens for years. We moved a year ago to the Southwest into a smaller place with almost no space to garden but we still have a worm farm inside – no smell whatsoever! We love to watch them take a slice of watermelon rind down to paper thin remains. Worms are so interesting and their byproduct can’t be beat for gardening. You cannot burn the vegetable plants that you use it on. So safe to use in the garden. When we plant now in large grow boxes on our patio, we will have the right kind of fertilizer that plants love.

RE: recomended worm farm temperature, your website quotes 65 degrees in winter and 72 degrees in summer. However you do not state degrees F or C . This makes this statement meaningless as both measures can be taken to be equally applicable in most countries in the world. Please make this matter clearer in this statement.

Given that roughly 80% of my traffic is from the US, where Fahrenheit is the default, and that every other reference in the post uses Fahrenheit, I think your use of the word “meaningless” is needlessly crass. That said, I have updated that section of the post to clarify it.